Various construction methods have been developed to address the issue of water on public roadways. One common method of improving a vehicle's traction on wet pavement has been to place longitudinal grooves in the roadways. While the grooved roadways provide improved traction for vehicles, such grooves also result in a reduction in both the handling and the rideability of the vehicle. This is caused by interactive forces between the vehicle's tires and the road grooves and is generally more acute on smaller vehicles. Consequently, tire manufacturers have been motivated to provide tire models which mitigate or eliminate the reduction in handling and rideability of vehicles caused by the grooved roadways.
In the past, tire performance was evaluated subjectively by placing a set of tires on a test vehicle and performing field evaluations. In such field testing, the driver would operate the vehicle on the grooved roadway and provide a subjective rating regarding the vehicle's handling and rideability as the vehicle traveled along the grooved highway as well as translated across various lanes to simulate actual driving conditions. Such subjective evaluations are very valuable in that they provide actual data reflecting the tire performance that correlates closely with customer satisfaction. Such subjective field analysis, however, is both a timeconsuming and an expensive process. First, four vehicle tires must be provided for the subjective analysis in order to provide an accurate reflection of the driving performance of the tires on the vehicle. Therefore, when testing a prototype tire design, four such tires must be manufactured. In the early prototype design phase, to avoid the high expense of creating tire molds, individual tires are often hand carved to fashion the desired tire tread. Hence, creating four such tires takes a substantially long period of time and each may differ slightly, thereby resulting in erroneous test data. Second, in order to test a tire design over various vehicle models to accurately reflect the tire performance across variable radial loading, additional prototype tires of other sizes must also be provided so that the tires may be effectively field tested for rain groove wander. Therefore, multiple tires are needed to appropriately field test each prototype tire design, thereby further increasing the development time and cost of the tire. Finally, there is an overhead cost involved with the shipping and handling of tires and tire disposal.